40 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 24, 1993 teeters on the edge of madness, a kind of losing touch with reality, and I think that her writing is what she uses to bring herself back." Certainly, Spark's novels reorder real- ity in peculiar ways, and madness does often seem an undercurrent in them. A brush with madness, in fact, may have been the catalyst that allowed her par- ticular genius to flower-that and her si- multaneous conversion to Roman Ca- tholicism. At thirty-six, for whatever reason- and the lingering trauma of her marriage may have had something to do with it- Spark found herself coming apart. "I was overreading in religious books, reading the whole of Newman-it was coinci- dental with that, and that might have been to do with it." In fact, Spark's con- version was probably a first attempt to piece herself back together. "It was the first philosophical integrity I've ever known," she says. "And it united a lot of disintegrating factors. It gave me a ground and something to measure from-'the still point in the turning world,' as Eliot said." Nevertheless, in January of 1954 she began hallucinating-and, being Muriel Spark, what she hallucinated was words. "They were amazing," she says. "The words jumped about and made anagrams on the page. And the ana- d " grams ma e sense. "She was really quite batty," says Alan Maclean, who be- came her fiction edi- tor. "When she was doing the Observer í crossword, she be- lieved that the an- swers to the clues were messages mocking her. And she thought that I was one of 'them'-'them' being the people who were planting the clues. For a long time after- ward, when she was under pressure she would react very badly. She would feel that things and people were against her." Finally, a doctor weaned her from the Dexedrine she had been taking, and the hallucinations sub- sided. But Spark remained tired and de- pressed, and it was only Maclean's inter- est in having her write a novel that eventually pulled her out of it. The book that resulted, "The Comforters," is fasci- nating: its heroine, Caroline Rose, is a recently converted Catholic who finds herself hallucinatIng not printed words but voices-voices that indicate to her that she has become a character in a novel. And, of course, she has-the very novel we're reading. Caroline copes with her predicament by poking at it, testing it. If she's a character in a novel, for in- stance, how can she feel paIn? And what about the people around her, like the frighteningly bosomy Georgina Hogg, a loathsome busybody whose private life is so meagre that she disappears whenever she's left alone? Are Hogg's vanishings fiction or truth? And how does one come to know the difference? "The Comforters" was sophisticated and funny-as Spark's books would al- ways be-but its seriousness of intent was undeniable. She had learned to transmute her experience into fiction, and what set her apart from other writ- ers who had done so was her fascination with exposing, rather than disguising, that process. Her newfound Catholicism had convinced her that there was such a thing as the absolute truth, and that to pretend that the stories a novelist in- vented were truths of the same order was shabby, maybe even sinful. Fiction was, she told an interviewer of the period, "a pack of lies," and she expected her reader to understand as much-it was almost a moral imperative. Hence she set out to make her tales higWy artificial: outland- ish things would happen in them; there would be infernally complex conspira- cies; there would be ghosts and sorcerers; there would be fantastic coincidences; most of all, there would be characters who themselves exposed the fictional process by inventing fictions of their own-liars, plotters, conspirators, spiri- tualists, villains who threatened the circle of friends or colleagues at the heart of almost every Spark novel by playing God with people's lives. Spark's bug- bears aren't sadists or psychopaths; they're meddlers and manipulators, like Jean Brodie-in short, they're characters who try to wrest the course of events from their Creator and take matters into their own hands. The way authors do. But Spark wasn't interested merely in proclaiming her fic- tions to be fictions. She also wanted them to be seductive, and in order to accomplish that she had to make them completely convincing. "In fiction, plausibil- ity is the big thing," she says. "Veracity. V e- racity is in details, not necessarily lead- ing anywhere-just chance details, throw- away things that have got nothing to do with anything. I like to sometimes open a paragraph just by say- ing something and then forgetting it. Just a reflection, and then forget that, get on with the story, because that's very often the way people think. 1'm very interested in fictional methods of persuading people that what you're I "I, , , \ -"ß4( ''If the phone bill seems a little high next month, it may be due to a two-hour conference call I had with Teddy and Wally; who are on spring break in London and Honolulu. "